From one of Canada’s most respected crime journalists come three shocking stories of true crime.A man rages in his home on April 4, 1999, breaking furniture and dishes. A woman wants to leave him. “You’re not going anywhere,” he tells her. Later that day, a police officer reports to the house and finds human tissue and organs in a bag left out for garbage. The person of interest in the case is a steelworker named Sam Pirrera, who lives in the house. But who is the victim? Following...

"Bare light bulbs shone against walls painted with graffiti and dried blood, the rooms reeking of a sweet pungent odour like burnt plastic ...” So writes award-winning Hamilton Spectator journalist and author Jon Wells in one of four harrowing murder stories in Death’s Shadow.Wells take readers up close into multiple homicide investigations, the agony of victims and their loved ones, and the chilling dance of death between cold-blooded killers and the hard-boiled ...

A jogger running in a field near the perimeter of the African Lion Safari theme park in southern Ontario stumbles across a near-mummified skeleton. The remains are studied at a hospital morgue by a forensic pathologist, a forensic anthropologist and a forensic entomologist (known as "the bug lady"). They discover that the victim was female, non-Caucasian. But who was she?Award-winning journalist and author Jon Wells delivers a gripping, CSI-style story tha...

Award-winning journalist Jon Wells reveals the life story and charts the three-year international manhunt for one of the FBI's most wanted killers, James Charles KoppPart detective story, part noir psychological thriller, Sniper tells the disturbing and compelling story of how anti-abortion radical James Kopp hunted down physicians in Canada and the US who were performing abortion services. Wells visits Kopp's home town in California and follows his trail ...

Veteran true crime writer Jon Wells leads us into a real-life crime investigation and the twisted mind of a murderous manA man rages in his home on April 4, 1999, breaking furniture and dishes. A woman wants to leave him. “You’re not going anywhere,” he tells her. Later that day, a police officer reports to the house and finds human tissue and organs in a bag left out for garbage. The person of interest in the case is a steelworker named Sam Pirrera, who lives in t...

A true Canadian story of terror, from Steeltown to IndiaPoison opens with a beautiful Indian-Canadian woman collapsing in front of her family and dying an agonizing death. Police are not called to the scene, and a renowned forensic pathologist is stumped over the cause of Parvesh Dhillon’s demise. But soon another gruesome death strikes the Indian community in Hamilton—this time a young man, the cause again a mystery. The beneficiary of the life insurance policy is...

The human story behind Canada's worst chemical fire"Why you leaving Stelco?" the friend asked the rookie firefighter."'Cause it's hot and dirty and I don't like shifts."Enter the world of Hamilton's firefighters. Theirs is a smouldering, combustible workplace, and in the effort to save lives they routinely put their own on the line. They know the ways of fire and fight to engage it, to be the one to break down the door and enter the furnace. They never give up...

He Died All Day Long is a story of the Vietnam War and the soldiers who fought it - on both sides - from a street kid in Pittsburgh, to a country boy from Missouri, even a Vietnamese peasant who wants nothing more than to grow rice. Until the war comes to all of them. Few Episodes in American History have ignited borader political and cultural controversy than our incursion into Vietnam. Time, if not a healer, does take the edge off. We are, thereby, finally seeing an increasing number of ...

*Winner of Best New True Crime Author, CrimeCon UK True Crime Awards 2023**Shortlisted for the ALCS Gold Dagger award for non-fiction, Crime Writers’ Association Awards 2023*The gripping true story of how Detective Superintendent Julie Mackay brought Melanie Road’s murderer to justice.BATH, 1984Jean Road, a 49-year-old mother of three, awakens to news that her daughter Melanie has been murdered in a nearby s...

A Chilling True Story of a Picture-Perfect Family Shattered by Secrets and MurderWhen high school sweethearts Karen and Richard Sharpe married, they shared an interest in medicine, a desire for family, and a dream for the future. But behind the doors of their upscale Massachusetts home, Dr. Sharpe was hiding dark secrets that would ultimately lead to cold-blooded murder.After years of abuse at the hands of her physician husband, Karen put an end to their 26...

In 1909, a bathtub drowning became one of the most famous and bizarre criminal cases in American history.On November 29, 1909, police were called to a ramshackle home in East Orange, New Jersey, where they found the emaciated body of twenty-four-year-old Oceana "Ocey" Snead facedown in the bathtub—dead of an apparent suicide by drowning. There was even a note left behind.But it would not take authorities long to discover that Ocey's death was no suicide. An...

"You ruined my life. You ruined my baby’s life!"Laurie Show was as compassionate as she was hard-working. The outgoing high-school junior worked part-time to pay for the home she and her divorced mother shared. Yet she always had time to tutor friends struggling in school. And she befriended a dejected classmate after his traumatic breakup with his pregnant long-time girlfriend Michelle Lambert.But soon things spiraled into jealous obsession, stalking, and ...